Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Awesome new diet plan!

I have recently made a new diet resolution: Beer Does Not Ride In The Car.

Barring truly inclement weather or me already being at the grocery store for the week's shopping, from now on if I want a six pack, it will need to be fetched via bicycle or on foot. I figure that the caloric expenditure of fetching it home should be a third to a half of the calories in the sixer, right there.

20 comments:

Heh. Welcome to the wonderful world of cycling. Just try not to get too snarky with all the people who, upon seeing you with a six-pack on a bicycle, will immediately give you that sympathetic look and begin to tell you about their DUI, ask you where you got caught, etc., etc...

For me, that'd be a hell of a diet plan: a 7-mile trip each way to get beer I won't drink. To get anything drinkable, maybe a 20-mile round trip. That'd take, lemme see....about a week, since the knee don't bend that far anymore.(Sigh) guess I'll stick with the weight machine. Pity, too, with an 18-speed Kawasaki in the shed that I've never ridden.

Actually, burning more calories works best. Taking in too few calories may cause your body to think you are in starvation mode, and it will hang on to every little bit it can. Better to give it what it wants in food, then take it away afterwards.

It's also a plan that seriously cuts in when the late-nite spontaneous "Whaa.. I finished that already??" happens - and you have to hop on the velocipede and pedal out to harvest more cold, hoppy goodness. Which brings us to: what way-cool monster Surefire own-the-night light clips to the tacticalbars? :-)

Yeah, it is nice being able to shoot in the back yard...or the front yard...or the side yard...On the other hand, I have to dispose of the 'possums I shoot when they come after the cat food. Left hand, cane: right hand, shovel. Awkward.

How far is the round trip to the store? I'll throw in my two cents and say that you're overly optimistic that a trip to the store will burn anywhere near a third of the cals in a six-pack. When I used to race I estimated that I would burn only about 850 calories riding a 40 km time trial in an hour. For my (then) 6'2" 210 lb frame at an average speed of 25 mph that worked out to about 34 calories/mile (most of the energy expenditure at that speed to overcome aero drag). I'd say you need to do an out and back of the full Monon trail for every beer if you want to cancel out the calories :-)Keep up the riding. Regular exercise elevates your resting metabolic rate so that you burn more calories even when at rest.